Swimming Is Starting to Feel Like a Job

Welcome to my podcast. Today was one of those days when I was just tired. We had our first short-course competition of the season. Technically, we had another competition during the summer, but that was a long time ago, so this really felt like the beginning of a new season.

Swimming has been exhausting as always. It looks easy because swimming is supposed to be fun, but it really is not, especially when you swim as much as I do. Honestly, when you swim too many times every week, it stops being fun. I remember back in the old days when swimming actually felt exciting. Now it mostly feels like a job, and not exactly a fun or interesting one. It is just something I do again and again and again.

I think that can happen with any sport. If you do something too much, eventually all the practices and meets start blending together. I honestly do not even remember every swim meet anymore because there are just too many of them. They all get jumbled together in my head.

But I will probably remember today’s meet because it was absolute torture. Technically, it should have been easy because most of my events were only 50s, plus one 100. But after warm-up, I had to wait around an hour and a half before my first event. Do you know how terrible that feels? You warm up, your body is ready, and then you just sit there forever. By the time I finally had to swim, I felt completely cold and stiff.

Then suddenly everything became rapid-fire. After waiting forever for the first event, the next two events felt like they came almost immediately. So the whole meet was basically nothing, nothing, nothing, and then everything at once. It was a giant mess, and I did not like it. But no matter what, I still swam, so I guess that counts for something.

Swimming is kind of a sport based on getting tired, wanting to quit, and then swimming again. And again. And again.

There was also something very important happening at the pool today: the paper towel leaderboard. This is not an official leaderboard, and it has nothing to do with swimming speed. Basically, if you take a wet paper towel and throw it really high, sometimes it sticks to the wall or ceiling. So people started claiming different paper towels as theirs depending on how high they got them. That became our unofficial leaderboard.

Today, someone destroyed it. He used his Croc and knocked all the paper towels down. The entire leaderboard disappeared, so obviously, we had to rebuild it.

There are different techniques for making paper towels stick. My first technique is what I call the Quick Lock Method. You take a big piece of paper towel, run it through hot water, maybe add a little soap, and then slam it onto the wall or ceiling. Wherever it lands, it almost always sticks at first. The problem is that it might only stay there for a minute before falling down.

The second method is better. You rinse the paper towel in hot water, then cold water, and then slam it as hard as possible. I do not know why this works. Maybe heat, pressure, science, whatever. I do not really care. It works, so I do it.

There is also a hole in the ceiling. I will not tell you exactly why there is a hole in the ceiling. It is totally unrelated to somebody throwing a shoe upward and somehow piercing the ceiling. Totally unrelated.

Anyway, besides all of that, swimming itself was still torture today. When we got there, part of me was just thinking, Oh, hell. I really do not want to swim.

I also realized something else today. I was actually nervous about this meet. I know that sounds strange because I swim all the time, but I had not raced in a few months, and apparently that affected me more than I expected. I felt kind of scared. Swimming suddenly seemed difficult again, almost unfamiliar, even though I have done it thousands of times.

I think part of it is that swimming has become so repetitive that when I finally have to race again, everything suddenly feels serious. I start wondering how hard it is going to be, whether I will swim well, whether I will be tired, and whether I even want to do this anymore.

Those feelings are still there. I have not solved them. But today I decided that I was going to swim anyway. I used basically all the strength I had, controlled myself, got into the water, and did it.

Swimming is not really fun for me right now. It feels old. It feels tiring. Sometimes it feels like a job. Sometimes I am nervous before I even start. But I am still doing it.

See you next time. I might follow up on this, because there is still a very long way to go.